Re-enabling Zendesk targets

When you install a SweetHawk app, part of the installation process is to create special targets that are linked to the app. These targets are there to allow your Zendesk to talk to our servers so that our servers know what and when to do stuff to your account. If one of these targets is disabled then our servers no longer get sent the information they need to be able to do those things.

Zendesk can automatically disable targets if it fires and fails too many times. You may be notified about this with an error message or you may receive an email like this:

The source of the problem as to why there were target failures could be many different things. In the case of SweetHawk apps, one of those reasons could be that there was a server outage.

Note that re-enabling the target during the server outage will most likely result in the target being disabled again, so it is important to check our status page and wait for the issue to be resolved before re-enabling them.

If you haven't seen an error message, some other symptoms that server communication has been impeded by something like this might be:

The app appears correctly in the sidebar, top bar and/or in the admin panel but...

All apps: You're not receiving popup notifications

Tasks: Solving a sub-ticket doesn't automatically mark it as completed in the parent ticket.

Deadline/Due Time: The deadline_now or due_now tag isn't being added to the ticket when the deadline hits.

Calendar: The calendar 'event_started' tag isn't being added when an event starts.

Approvals: When an approval is granted, it's not posting it in the comment stream of the ticket.

The main issue with these special targets is that while Zendesk can de-activate them, Zendeskdoes notallow you to re-activate them manually.

The Solution:

Disabling and re-enabling the app(IMPORTANT: Do not uninstall as this could cause you to lose data)

The good news is that there is a simple solution, that is to deactivate and reactivate the app. The act of doing this kicks Zendesk back into gear and makes the special targets active again (even if they've been deactivated).

To deactivate an app click on the cog in the main bar on the left, then under 'APPS' click on 'Manage' and finally, right-click on the app in question and flick the switch to disable it like this:

Wait 10 seconds before re-enabling it using the same switch.

IMPORTANT: Do not uninstall the app. This is completely different from disabling an app and doing this could cause you to lose data.

Once the app has been re-enabled, refresh your browser and then test your app to make sure the problem is resolved.

If you're still having trouble after trying the above suggestions emailsupport@sweethawk.co and we can help with further troubleshooting.

Moving forward:

Once you have re-enabled the target, for any new tickets everything should then be back to normal. However, this does not automatically fix the issue on existing tickets where a target has failed.

So, if you're using the Tasks app it may mean that the parent ticket still can't see the child tickets, or if you're using Deadline app, the tickets that had deadlines added to them while the target was disabled still won't fire at the time set. You may see similar types of issue with the other apps.

All that needs to happen to kick these tickets back into gear is for them to have a single update of any kind. For example: adding an internal comment, adding a tag, changing the status are all valid updates. If your tickets see a lot of activity, you may not need to take any further action at this point because they'll all be naturally updated in due course.

If your tickets see less activity, you may choose to manually update tickets as things crop up. Alternatively, you could take a more pro-active approach and run an automation that updates all un-closed tickets by adding a tag to them. The example automation below is checking for all tickets that are less than closed and have not been updated in 100 hours. You should change the number of hours to approximately just before you think the target was disabled.

Note that automations only run once an hour, so after you create the automation, you will need to wait up to one hour for it to work its thing.

Also, note that automations only update up to 1000 tickets at a time, so depending on the number of tickets that meet the conditions you set in the automation, you may need to let the automation run for several hours running.